How trauma affects your nervous system

Note: This article has the potential to bring up uncomfortable feelings. Before reading this please have a self soothing or grounding strategy in mind you can use if intense feelings emerge. If you need some ideas take a look at my other article: What to do when your trauma is triggered.

Trauma is any experience or cluster of experiences that is deeply disturbing or distressing. When trauma occurs it has a profound impact on your psychological health, and it also has a deep impact on your nervous system and how you react to future experiences. Trauma can have deep, sometimes permanent effects on your life and on how you navigate your experience, emotion, and memories. If you have experienced trauma, it is important to understand how it might be affecting your life today. 

Fight, flight, and freeze

In the face of danger, your brain and nervous system work together to create a strong and rapid response to help you survive the perceived threat. These responses have developed evolutionarily, and we share some of these strategies with other animals and even reptiles. The main three danger response programs we have as humans are fight, flight, and freeze.

• Fight is when you get a rush of energy and aggression and feel the need to forcefully fight your way out of a situation that feels dangerous. This response can be likened to a dog aggressively attacking a stranger who is threatening her puppies. It is quick, angry, and forceful.

• Flight is when you feel the need to run as fast as you can away from a dangerous situation. This can be likened to a gazelle running away from a lion when it pounces. It is fast, fearful, and energetic.

• Freeze happens when you lose the ability to move or speak, and you feel stuck in a frozen statue-like state. This can be likened to a possum playing dead in the face of a predator.

Each of these responses is evolutionarily adaptive, meaning it was helpful at some point in the past. Sometimes these responses are even adaptive in our everyday lives as well, it is helpful to feel a rush of energy in a dangerous situation to help you escape.

How trauma affects fight, flight, and freeze

When you experience a distressing, maybe life threatening event, your system will default to one of these three strategies. If you’ve been through a terrifying mugging, you might experience a strong desire to fight or flee in that moment. Many sexual assault survivors describe a dissociated freeze feeling in response to the assault. Your body works as it was evolved to, and in the face of threat it will recall one of these survival strategies to try to keep you safe.

Unfortunately, when trauma occurs, these programs can get out of whack and become triggered or stuck in uncomfortable ways. Because trauma overloads your nervous system with unbearable stress, it can cause your nervous system to become stuck in one of these danger response programs well past when the actual threat is gone. When this happens, your nervous system never believes that the danger is gone, and you will go through life perpetually stuck in a fight, flight, or freeze response.

In addition, a traumatized nervous system will jump prematurely to a fight, flight, or freeze response when you find yourself in a situation that is similar enough to the original traumatic event. This is what trauma triggers are, situations that remind your nervous system of the original trauma will bring you into one of these elevated stress response states even if there is no danger present. This causes all sorts of uncomfortable and difficult symptoms to occur in traumatized individuals.

If you have suffered from trauma you might recognize how you either switch quickly into a fight, flight, or freeze response when it is not warranted, or your nervous system might be stuck perpetually in one of these modes in your life. It’s important to recognize the physiological markers of one of these threat responses so you know when you have switched out of your baseline, rest and relaxation mode to an elevated or frozen state.

This is what rest, fight, flight and freeze can feel like in your physical and emotional body:

Rest & relaxation

Slower heart rates

Increased digestive functioning

Increased social engagement

Relaxed gastrointestinal tract

Feeling safe

Fight

Increased heart rate

On alert

Feelings of anger

Tension in jaw

Nausea or tightness in stomach

Flight

Increased heart rate

Feelings of wanting to flee

Energy in legs/feet

Feelings of fear and anxiety

Freeze

Decreased heart rate

Constricted breathing

Feelings of numbness

Pale skin

Inability to speak or move

Recognizing these states as distinct and happening at a subconscious level is important so you don’t blame yourself for these responses - they are happening outside of your control! And understanding how to regulate yourself back into a state of rest and relaxation is essential before you try to navigate complex situations in which you might be triggered.

Regulation

Recognizing when you are in one of these threat responses, and knowing what they feel like, can help you identify when you need to focus on regulation to bring yourself back into a safe nervous system mode. Because these threat responses happen at a physiological and subconscious level, it’s important to remember that you can’t always just think your way out of these places, and often the regulation methods for trauma healing are more body based than thought based.

Some physical activities that may help regulate you out of these elevated states include:

• Deep intentional breaths

• Exercise like jumping jacks or push ups

• Going for a walk

• Changing your environment to get away from a trigger

• Knitting, drumming, or tapping your body alternating on your left and right side

Understanding what is happening in your traumatized nervous system when it experiences threats is extremely important to help you find ways to heal. Understanding leads to self compassion, destigmatization, and opens the potential for regulation strategies and other solutions to bring you back to a restful nervous system. If you have experienced trauma you might be overwhelmed by all your trauma reactions and it can be hard to organize yourself in a productive direction. Finding a safe way to understand your nervous system and regulate yourself is an essential first step in trauma healing.

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If you have suffered from trauma and need support in your healing, feel free to reach out for a free 20 minute phone consultation to see if I could be a good fit to help you. I offer compassionate and effective trauma therapy online in California and in person in Santa Cruz and would be happy to talk with you to answer any questions you might have.